In any oil field exploration and development, indirect measurements such as detailed geological description, outcrop data, etc., and direct measurements such as seismic, cores, logs, and fluid samples, etc., provide useful information for static and dynamic reservoir description, simulation, and forecasting. Besides being static, core and log data delineate only the vicinity of the wellbore, and geological and seismic data usually are not directly related to formation permeability. Because they are dynamic and direct, pressure measurements and interval (local) transient tests provide information about reservoir pressure and permeability distributions, and fluid samples for well productivity and dynamic reservoir description, and therefore are useful for exploration as well as for production and reservoir engineering. For exploration, pressure measurements and interval tests may simply show that the formation can flow and permit sampling of the formation fluid and provide productivity index, reservoir pressure, permeability, and data for heterogeneity.
Permeability is an important parameter when dealing with reservoir management and well performance. Because of its direct effects on well productivity and many reservoir displacement processes, the determination of permeability and permeability anisotropy are becoming increasingly important as emphasis shifts from primary to secondary and tertiary recovery mechanisms. In the past, conventional wireline formation testers (WFT) have traditionally been used to obtain formation pressure and permeability distributions in the formation along the wellbore. More recently, improvements in wireline formation testers have made it possible to conduct local production, buildup, and interference tests, which is commonly referred to as interval pressure transient testing (IPTT) or vertical interference tests. These tests are usually conducted with a WFT including a single probe, dual-packer, or dual-probe and/or any combination of them, such as multiprobe or dual-packer and multiprobe probe combinations. Conventional IPTT tests have traditionally been used to obtain spatial distributions of the formation permeability and pressure. The tensorial permeability distributions of the formation typically includes two components, namely horizontal and vertical permeabilities in the near-well formation, typically with in a range up to one hundred feet
However, for pressure transient interval test (IPTT) design, implementation, and interpretation, there is currently no integrated systematic procedure and/or program which may be used to obtain spatial distributions of the formation permeability and pressure. Rather, using conventional techniques, more than six different programs and/or algorithms are typically used to obtain spatial distributions of the formation permeability and pressure. Moreover, many of the conventional programs used to generate such estimates are implemented using DOS based software and typically or designed to perform only isolated tasks relating to permeability and/or pressure calculations. As a result, a considerable amount of time is spent on non-productive tasks such as, for example, importing/exporting data from one platform to another. A considerable amount of additional time may then be required to build geological and reservoir models for permeability inversion, which are typically built manually from other geoscience data (logs, local geology, etc.). Accordingly, it will be appreciated that there exists a need to improve systematic procedures and algorithms relating to IPTT design, implementation, and interpretation in order to provide for improved efficiency and resource utilization as well as reliable estimates of spatial formation permeability and pressure distributions.